I was waiting to hear back from jkbbwr about this (and never did). No one discussed the idea, so I forgot about it really. Yay or nay on hosting the old forum next to the new forum instead of merging? I feel like merging for phpBB will be more painful than merging for a Python forum this community writes itself.

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It would indeed be a nice and simple step to have the old forum as a read-only archive at pythonforum - This could be done quickly.

Then again, the end goal should be to try and merge the two forums. This will surely take more work. When I google for "merge phpbb" I find lots of hits, so even though it is no standard function, it has indeed been done successfully before.

The status of the python forum software I do not know, and I do not think we should do the same error again and rely too much on it, before it is actually usable.

Too bad jkbbwr does not update the status too often. I can understand how he is probably pretty busy, but then again we need to be able to offer help somehow as well. I see good suggestions in the other thread as well, but no responses either.

Merging them will not restore the old bookmarks, and I believe will likely break new ones. It may be difficult to prevent that if it is possible at all. I will commit to doing it if people want, but it will take time and I'll come here to ask for feedback on how to proceed when there are decisions to be made.

I'm not sure if I can assign topic IDs however I wish, or if they need to be linear with respect to time, yet. If they do not need to be linear; would people like to make requests for topic IDs which are important to not change? (For bookmarks.) If they are linear, then all the posts on this current forum will change and there's no way around it. Also, old bookmarks would still have to drop the /python-forum part of the URLs since even if we use the old topic IDs we aren't going to revert to that icky legacy behavior.

Alternative ideas I'm thinking of now would be to recover specific posts from the old forum and merge them on a case-by-case basis, and if possible increase people's post count. I'm really not sure what's possible yet.

RE: using previous solutionsWe have a bit of special cases, since we need to merge some users stuff. You're welcome to do the research for me and figure that out, but do be aware that our case may be at least slightly more complicated, and I'm afraid the tools won't do well. Perhaps we could use one of those tools and then do spot adjustments. Just brainstorming here.

Thoughts?

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ochichinyezaboombwa wrote:As for the "/python-forum" part: that should be trivial? (virtual dir on Apache config, no programming involved) - or am I missing some big hidden rock?

Theoretically, I can do the merge and then deploy the changes myself. To modify Apache requires jkbbwr.

Someone mentioned here or in the other thread about jkbbwr not being active; if he gave us all the power we needed, such as one or more people having Apache power, then I would have no problem with him having a life. But I'm not happy that he didn't put someone in his place before he bailed.

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I haven't completely bailed and I am returning, so smile Im back and for good.

You will also be happy to know that hosting is ensured by a good friend of mine, and after the first year we no longer have to pay.

As far as the "new" forum goes, I will be looking into designing it eventually, getting my head around the database is gonna be a little bit of a pain in the ass but Im going to start a discussion about that shortly.

As far as the "old" forum goes, I will generate a dump of this current version, let mic fire up phpBB locally and attempt a merge or generation, or go with "/pythonforumold" or something, if he finds a succinct solution then It will get implemented to the public soon as he is ready.

jkbbwr wrote:As far as the "old" forum goes, I will generate a dump of this current version, let mic fire up phpBB locally and attempt a merge or generation, or go with "/pythonforumold" or something, if he finds a succinct solution then It will get implemented to the public soon as he is ready.

Once you get working on the new forum, feel free to prescribe a format that you want the old data in for import into the new version. I've looked at the dump a little bit so I would probably be the best one to convert it for the new (and I assume that if the current forum doesn't match the old, that they're very similar).

Let me know once you start hacking away at the new forum too, I'd like to contribute but at the moment am busy getting used to my new job and still getting settled in my new apartment.

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I feel like open-source work is almost always like this for us as programmers -- we always want to contribute to a bazillion projects, but then the reality that there are only 24 hours in each day hits us hard.